That mentality you decry is more or less justified. Had Islam stayed in the eastern arabian peninsula and never forced itself on people from casablanka to Jakarta to Istanbul it'd be unjustified. But we live in the world where Islam conquered a good chunk of the planet so..
Oy. Indonesia was proselytized by Sufi missionaries, not forcibly converted. And, for the most part, initial Muslim conquests didn't want to convert people...converts couldn't be enslaved and couldn't pay the
jizya. Why did the Persians convert? Because Zoroastrianism kept all of the power and authority in a small group of religious experts and propped up a deeply divided society, while Islam was an egalitarian faith open to everyone. Why did the people of the former Byzantine lands convert? The Byzantine government had become so orthodoxy-crazed that the slightest aberration was branded heresy and fiercely punished...anyone with even slightly heterodox views wouldn't think too well of Byzantine Christianity. Islam was simply more attractive than its competitors.
That's not to say that Islam wasn't spread by the sword in some areas, like the subcontinent and parts of Africa...just like Catholicism spread to the native populations of the New World by the sword.
